Simone de Beauvoir said it and it was an omen. “Never forget that a political, economic or religious crisis will be enough for women’s rights to be questioned again. These rights are never taken for granted, you must remain vigilant throughout your life.” This happened in June 2022, when the United States Supreme Court repealed the right to abortion in the country, 50 years after having won it. The decision of Roe v. Wade, which demonstrated that changes in political or judicial power can put at risk victories that were believed to have been overcome, shook decades of struggle, but failed to stop the tide on the continent. Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, where justice has just decriminalized the interruption of pregnancy at the federal level, have emerged as beacons for the defense of women’s reproductive rights in America.
Behind the latest Latin American conquest there is no luck, only work and an ambitious legal strategy that has been in the works for years. “It’s now or never”: the lawyers of Gire (Chosen Reproduction Information Group) thought just before starting to prepare dozens of judicial protections with which to modify the criminal codes of the majority of the 32 States of Mexico. The plan began after September 7, 2021. That day, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) ruled in a devastating sentence that it was unconstitutional to put a woman in jail for having an abortion, in which the then president of the court, Arturo Zaldívar, defined it as “a new route of freedom, dignity and respect and a great step in the historic fight for equality.”
The precedent was so strong that the feminist organization decided to take advantage of it to change the future of millions of women. The first step had been achieved: women could not be imprisoned—judges had the obligation to dismiss their cases—but they could be criminalized, persecuted, and stigmatized. The ideal path would have been for the local State Congresses to voluntarily decide to change their legislation, but two years later, in total, only 11 entities had eliminated the crime of abortion. And even in those entities access was very limited. For example, in Sinaloa, if women arrived at a state medical center to terminate their pregnancy, but they were users of federal services – such as the IMSS or ISSSTE – they were sent there, where it was still prohibited.
This is how the calculations and variables began. In which States were there going to be the most obstacles? Which ones should go first? Based on that, they prepared the strategy and this week, the results emerged. First was winning protection for Aguascalientes, one of the most conservative states in the country, and Wednesday was the most important. The SCJN unanimously determined that the articles that regulated abortion in the federal criminal code should be repealed and that federal health institutions were obliged to care for women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies, without medical personnel being criminalized (which until now he even faced five years of disqualification).
The first chamber of the Supreme Court ruled and the phone of Rebeca Ramos, the director of Gire, began to burn. They were congratulations on 20 years of struggle. “What follows now is that the remaining 21 States be decriminalized, through protections,” he explains to EL PAÍS, “and the most important thing is the provision of services, that there are conditions, that if someone decides to have an abortion in do it safely at home, that if she needs to go to a hospital they will take good care of her, and that this will happen throughout the country.” And in case she doesn’t seem like it by saying it quickly, she adds: “It’s not an easy challenge.”
The latest advances in Mexico have gone hand in hand with justice. How do you feel? “It is a bittersweet feeling, on the one hand, it is sad to see that the State Congresses made reforms to hinder rights, when from your representatives you would expect protection from the secular State as well, but at the same time very satisfied that there are different powers and counterweights. My little heart As a lawyer, she says how nice that law has been a tool to promote rights,” Ramos reflects.
The judicial alliance under the shadow of Roe v. Wade
The Court has also been a great ally in Colombia, where last year, in a pioneering international ruling, abortion was decriminalized up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. That happened on February 21 and on the 22nd, the job of the organization that had promoted it was to protect it. “When the sentence came out, the anti-rights groups filed more than 30 requests for annulment, that is, they asked the Court to annul the ruling,” explains doctor Ana Cristina González, from Causa Justa. Not even now that all these requests have been resolved and the ruling of the Constitutional Court has been reaffirmed can we lower our arms.
The right to abortion has become a push and trench fight. Feminist organizations push to achieve progress and when they achieve it, they have to close ranks to defend it. “We already had a judicial decision from 2006 that had created three causes [para permitir el aborto] and we had to fight to protect that decision for 15 years,” adds González, who recalls that even then conservative groups promoted a referendum, as now, to reject through popular means the right to terminate a pregnancy.
But the Bioethics expert is optimistic: “Opinion surveys from 2017 to date have shown that opinion is increasingly in favor of this being a decision for women, 92% of people are against it.” forced motherhood and no more than 2% of people want the Church and the State to get involved in these personal decisions.” Therein lies success, believes the pioneer of Causa Justa: “In changing people’s hearts and heads, that is, advancing social decriminalization.”
Thus, although the judicial ally now lives under the shadow of Roe vs. Wade, Ana Cristina González believes that “the last four decades have been about the consolidation of rights”: “We are in a forward movement and all forward movements generate resistance. There are nuclei and structures that are still very rigid within our society, which do not resist the advancement of women’s rights, because these challenge the State at all levels. And we are demanding what I consider to be the cultural battle of this century: the reproductive freedom of women, what we can say about our bodies.”
Milei against a bone of democracy
In Latin America there are still countries in which a woman cannot have an abortion even if she has been raped, her life is in danger or the fetus has malformations. It is a total ban in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Suriname or Jamaica. In Panama, women have to go through a multidisciplinary commission. In Guatemala, Peru, Costa Rica or Venezuela, an abortion can only be performed if there is a clear risk to the life of the pregnant woman. There is no country in the region that fully recognizes the will of women as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Even in the country that gave the green scarf as a symbol, attacks come.
Javier Milei came in first place in the so-called Argentine primaries and within a few days, within a multiverse of proposals against science, against the repudiation of the dictatorship, against the State, he also had one for women: calling a plebiscite to repeal abortion. “I think that only the threat is a way of trying to tame us,” says Argentine activist Luciana Peker, who does not believe that this battle was an easy piece for the far-right. “The political process in Argentina to legalize abortion through Congress was very profound, it touched the entire democratic structure, it put a million people on the streets, it was a process that went to the core of democracy,” the journalist reasons. specialized in gender.
“Now comes this sexist response, because the right to abortion is evidently the greatest achievement of women and it bothers the extreme right of Trump, Bolsonaro, Vox, Milei so much because it is a right that represents the possibility of the future, of advancement. . In a collapsed world it is the political symbol that we are better now than before and that we can still be better. And that bothers a lot,” says Peker. The Argentine concludes: “The right to abortion is the most important political construction that has been made in Latin America, it is the only unified policy that exists in the entire region, and we women have made it.”
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